Well, and with a whole generation having happened in between.
It had been twenty-six years last time, surely at a winter-break coming-home time from his college, so even there, I rarely saw him; he’d graduated from high school just before we’d moved to his hometown in New Hampshire, when we were newly out of grad school ourselves.
There, that first Christmas, the good brother at church leading the meeting stood up to announce we were going to sing “With Wondering Awe.” Only, the guy pronounced it “With Wandering R” and Richard and I about died, hands clamped over our mouths to try to physically restrain ourselves from bursting out laughing, trying not to glance at each other for fear that would be it and we would lose it: that good man with the thick Down East accent had R’s that wanduhed in and out all ovah the place! What a perfect and perfectly inadvertent rendition of a small New England town at Christmas!
I kept sneaking glances over thataway during Sunday School today and finally mouthed, Are you Dave’s brother?
He grinned and nodded, confirming out loud after the lesson was over: Yes! Adding, looking at my now-gray hair and new-grandmother face, I remember you!
Their mother had been, in Mormon-speak, my Relief Society (the frontier-era-named women’s organization) President back when our children were small and hers were in high school and, this one, college.
The older I get the more it seems like random people from my past will somehow randomly show up again–and so often, you pick up right from where you were as if the conversation had never ended, somehow.
But I know that I’m glad that it’s so. Those are moments that bear witness to the immortality of the too-often-hidden love for one another that underlies our day-to-days.